The main cause of death and disability in the US

    Stroke (中风) is the main cause of death and disability in the United States. Every 45 seconds, someone in America has a stroke. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} It is the nation's third leading cause of death, ranking behind diseases of the heart and all forms of cancer. The following is something more about stroke.

Definition and description of a stroke

    Stroke is a type of cardiovascular disease. It affects the arteries(动脉) leading to and within the brain. A stroke occurs when a blood vessel（血管） that carries oxygen and nutrients to the brain is either blocked by a clot or bursts. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} So stroke forms.

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    The American Stroke Association has identified several factors (因素) that increase the risk of stroke. The more risk factors a person has, the greater the chance that he or she will have a stroke. Some of these you can't control, such as increasing age, family health history, race, and previous stroke. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Factors resulting from lifestyle or environment can be improved with a healthcare provider's help.

Breakthroughs in treatment

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} In fact, about 600,000 people have strokes every year. For many years, there was no hope for those suffering a stroke. However, recent breakthroughs have led to new treatments. For the treatments to work, the person must get to a hospital immediately.

    Recently some American scientists have given a useful piece of advice to people in industrialized nations．They say people should eat more of the same kind of food eaten by humans living more than 10,000 years ago． {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    The scientists say that the human life has changed greatly．Our bodies have not been able to deal with these changes in lifestyle and this had led to new kinds of sicknesses． {#blank#}2{#/blank#} So they are called “diseases of civilization”．Many cancers and diseases of the blood system are examples of such diseases.

    Scientists noted that people in both the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age enjoyed very little alcohol or tobacco, probably none． {#blank#}3{#/blank#} However, a change in food is one of the main differences between life in ancient times and that of today.

    Stone Age people hunted wild animals for their meat, which had much less fat than domestic ones．They ate a lot of fresh wild vegetables and fruits．They did not have milk or any other dairy products, and they made very little use of grains． {#blank#}4{#/blank#} We eat six times more salt than our ancestors．We eat more sugar．We eat twice as much fat but only one third as much protein and much less vitamin C.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} But scientists say that we would be much healthier if we eat much the same way the ancient people did, cutting the amount of fatty, salty and sweet food.

A．Stone Age people lived a simple life.

B．But today, we enjoy eating a lot of these.

C．In that case, they would live much healthier.

D．Ancient people also got lots of physical exercise.

E．These new sicknesses were not known in ancient times.

F．People today probably don't want to live like our ancestors.

G．Modern people used to suffer from “diseases of civilization”.

    Did you know that the color of uniforms（制服）can influence the performance of an athlete？ It may sound strange, but a study suggests this might be true.

    Two British scientists studied the results of four spots in the 2004 Athens Olympic Games where the athletes had been given either a red or a blue uniform. They discovered that when there was a big difference in the score, color had no influence on the result . But if it was a close match, the athlete in a red uniform was more likely to win. Then they looked at the uniforms of the soccer teams at the Euro 2004 tournament. Again, teams wearing red won more games.

    The two scientists got their idea from earlier studies of wild animals. It had been discovered that when a male（雄性）shows red on its body, it sends a signal（信号）of its power and strength. For example, in many kinds of monkey, the more the male shows off its red scars（伤疤），the more females it can attract.

    Based on this fact, the British scientists thought that the idea might work for humans, too. According to them, when an athlete sees a competitor in a red uniform, he gets a feeling that his competitor could be stronger than him. And that kind of feeling may have a bad influence on the player's performance in the actual game.

    Although the idea is interesting, most people don't accept that color signals in the animal world can really be useful to humans in sports. They think that it is unreasonable to develop an idea based on such a small number of examples. Much more research has to be done to prove the influence of uniform colors on the performance of athletes.

    What makes a sense of humor is a difficult thing to tell. Different people find different things funny, and what may seem hilarious to some, will be highly rude to others. However, having some kind of sense of humor is important for reducing stress and getting along with others. Therefore, it's important to think about ways to improve your sense of humor.

    Look for the funny side of situations. While it can be difficult at times to find the funny side in unfortunate events when you're having a bad day, try to think about how the situation might look like to other people, and attempt not to get too angry. Laughing over minor accidents, trips and falls will help you in preventing the loss of temper that you will regret later.

    Learn some basic jokes. Some people find it hard to remember jokes, and feel left out when others are telling them. It's worth trying to learn a few jokes that you can pull out the bag when you need to, or regularly think about how you can turn a funny situation that occurs in daily life into an entertaining anecdote(趣闻) for later.

    Look at joke or humor cards. There are many different kinds of funny cards available, which can be a great inspiration for finding ways to improve your sense of humor. Giving an appropriate funny card to friends and family on the right occasion will show that you have a good sense of humor and are thinking about them.

    Learn from friends. Look at friends that you think have a great sense of humor. How do they deal with situations, and what kind of jokes do they make? Is there anything you can take away from their actions?

 Imagine this. You need an image of a balloon for a work presentation and turn to an AI text- to- image generator, like Midjourney or DALL-E, to create a suitable image. You enter the prompt(提示词)" red balloon against a blue sky" but the generator returns an image of an egg instead.

What's going on? The generator you' re using may have been" poisoned". What does this mean?

Text- to- image generators work by being trained on large databasets that include millions or billions of images. Some of the generators have been trained by indiscriminately (任意地) scraping online images, many of which may be under copyright. This has led to many copyright infringement(侵害) cases where artists have accused big tech companies of stealing and profiting from their work.

 This is also where the idea of" poison" comes in. Researchers who want to empower individual artists have recently created a tool named" Nightshade" to fight back against unauthorised image scraping. The tool works by slightly changing an image's pixels(像素) in a way that confuses the computer vision system but leaves the image unchanged to a human's eyes. If an organization then scrapes one of these images to train a future AI model, its data pool becomes" poisoned". This can result in mistaken learning, which makes the generator return unintended results. As in our earlier example, a balloon might become an egg.

 The higher the number of" poisoned" images in the training data, the greater the impact. Because of how generative AI works, the damage from" poisoned" images also affects related prompt keywords. For example, if a" poisoned" image of a Picasso work is used in training data, prompt results for masterpieces from other artists can also be affected.

 Possibly, tools like Nightshade can be abused by some users to intentionally upload" poisoned" images in order to confuse AI generators. But the Nightshade's developer hopes the tool will make big tech companies more respectful of copyright. It does challenge a common belief among computer scientists that data found online can be used for any purpose they see fit.

 Human rights activists, for example, have been concerned for some time about the indiscriminate use of machine vision in wider society. This concern is particularly serious concerning facial recognition. There is a clear connect ion between facial recognition cases and data poisoning, as both relate to larger questions around technological governance. It may be better to see data poisoning as an innovative(创新的) solution to the denial of some fundamental human rights.